(G2)
02.08.2026
Dear second.garden,
Here comes a letter from the place I would immediately project whenever imagining “a garden”. My grandma’s allotment garden, where she has spend all of her summers since I was a child.
I was sometimes looked after there when I was little; now I sometimes look after the garden (and her). Despite this gradual shift of roles, everything still revolves around the same rituals. We eat cold buttermilk soup, pick currants, plums, and apples when it is time. Nowadays she also usually tries to pour a beer or two into me before I leave, as if to improve my usefulness or perhaps to prompt a confession, preferably about love life or outright marriage. Otherwise we prune, cut, wash, and clean things: the terrace roof, for instance (picture), and, most importantly, the gutters.
My grandma has taught me many things. One of them, very concretely, is to sometimes lie directly on the ground.
We have done it together since I was very small, and we still do, although mostly separately now. Even so, I often think of her whenever I do it, and sometimes it even makes me recall the sound of her voice reading aloud from Grimm’s Fairy Tales or One Thousand and One Nights, together with my childhood inner visions of these stories rendered through the garden and its various appearances (frog's-eye view) half awake, half asleep.
I have sometimes been shocked to find my grandma lying motionless in the middle of the lawn when I arrive. No blanket, no pillow, just there in all her clothes, as if she had simply fallen over. She says it is good for you, and I have come to feel the same. Whenever I do it, I feel the body and soul being gently pulled downwards, aligning with the crust of the earth and all the organisms emerging from it. I become aware of gravity and the planetary tensions I safely take part in, quietly travelling through me like the wireless charging of an iPhone.
Niels Grønbæk recently told me about a trick to reorient oneself this way, towards the planet: take, for instance, a landscape painting, and slowly start rotating it. Somewhere around, say, sixty-three degrees, the ground stops acting simply as a base and begins appearing as a body. It should be inspired by the Revolution works (1990-2002) by Hiroshi Sugimoto, where sea, sky, and horizon are rotated out of their usual order. The moon no longer seems to simply slide across our “ceiling”. Instead, the images gives a sense of us drifting alongside it and all the other spinning bodies in this strange and endless opening of space through which we are also turning.
Esther and my grandma at Circle K, the E6
These summer days, I am once again returning to the lying directly on the ground practice of my grandma whenever I get the chance. If there are situations that create pressure head down through the body, here you have the chance to redistribute those forces evenly, get in touch with the heartbeat of the planet, and maybe even pick up a faint signal from another entity out there, crossing our pathway.
Best,
Laurits
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